Is it 'naval diplomacy' or gearing up for war?

Is it 'naval diplomacy' or gearing up for war?

Imanuddin Razak, Jakarta

The fresh tension between Indonesia and neighbor Malaysia over
claims to a border area of the oil-and-gas-rich blocks of Ambalat
in the Sulawesi sea has significantly subdued following Jakarta's
commitment to withdraw five of the seven Indonesian warships from
the area on Tuesday.

However, the move does not necessarily mean that the potential
conflict between the two countries of the same ancestral origin
is completely over. The withdrawal of warships was due to
Indonesia's willingness to try to settle the dispute through
diplomatic channels, rather than pursuing a show of military
supremacy.

The warships withdrawal followed an agreement between leaders
of the two countries to send their foreign ministers to Jakarta
for talks to settle the dispute on Wednesday.

Indonesia previously dispatched seven warships and four F-16
jet fighters for closer surveillance of two deep-water concession
blocks that Malaysia is claiming as part of its territory.
Hundreds of soldiers and thousands of others were ready for
deployment to the disputed area to counter the presence of
Malaysian warships and patrol planes there.

The dispute emerged after Malaysia's state-owned oil company
Petronas awarded production sharing contracts to Shell in the
blocks last month. Jakarta protested Malaysia's claim over the
territory, but to no avail.

Meanwhile, Indonesia has since 1980 declared the blocks as its
territory based on the Djuanda Declaration in 1957, which was in
1959 upheld by the United Nations through its Sea Law Convention.
In 1999, Indonesia granted an oil-drilling concession in one of
the blocks to ENI of Italy and the other block to UNOCAL of the
United States.

The current tension is not the first in the countries'
history. The first conflict was in 1961 following the division of
Borneo island into four regions: Kalimantan which belongs to
Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam and two British colonies Sarawak and
Sabah, which later joined Malaysia.

The prolonged conflict only ended in October 1965 when Army
general Soeharto replaced founding president Sukarno, which was
followed by an official ending of the conflict in a conference in
Bangkok in May 1966.

The second conflict, which was longer than the former,
actually started in the early 1900s when both Indonesia and
Malaysia were still under the occupation of the Netherlands and
Britain, respectively. The second conflict centered around the
dispute over the claim of ownership of the Sipadan-Ligitan
islands.

The dispute came to a head in 1969 but was not settled until
1997 when both countries agreed to bring the conflict to the
International Court of Justice. And Indonesia lost the legal
battle on Dec. 17, 2002 when the Court declared Malaysia the
legitimate owner of the two islands.

Still recovering from the bitter loss in the 2002 legal
battle, Indonesia is reeling again from the fresh dispute over
the "economically promising" oil and gas blocks. Quite annoyed
with the ongoing expulsion of illegal Indonesian workers from
Malaysia, the fresh dispute over the blocks has raised anti-
Malaysian sentiments in many parts of the country, suggesting the
people's readiness to go to war with Malaysia to settle the
latest border conflict.

And although it is very unlikely that Indonesia will launch a
military offensive against Malaysia, armed conflict is not an
impossibility either, especially when observing third party
interests in the blocks' rich oil and gas potential.

A rough estimate of both countries' military might puts
Indonesia and Malaysia at relatively equal strength, meaning that
there would be no eventual winner should there be armed conflict.
The only difference will be in the number of troops that each
country has, with Indonesia having the benefit of a greater
number of personnel. It has been reported that Indonesia has some
250,000 troops, while Malaysia has less than 200,000 military
personnel.

In view of the fact that there will be no winner should
Indonesia and Malaysia decide to go to war, they should also bear
in mind that any decision to go to war will not benefit either
country at all and will only bring more suffering to the people,
especially to Indonesians who have yet to completely recover from
the equally crippling political and economic crisis.

And people would hate to see war, which is universally
understood as a last resort in settling disputes between
countries when diplomacy fails, occur.

The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.